ago, the Mediterranean was an open seaway
extending far to the east. But slowly Arabia
swung northward into Turkey, making the
young Mediterranean an Atlantic gulf.
Then the rocks of Africa and Iberia finally
closed in the west, creating a natural dam
at Gibraltar.
"If that happened today, the Mediterra
nean would dry up again, because more wa
ter evaporates here than the rivers and
rainfall replenish," says paleontologist Ma
ria Bianca Cita, who was aboard the Glomar
Challenger. "You would get a drop in sea
level of one meter [three feet] a year," adds
one of her colleagues, geologist Kenneth
Hsi. "You'd get the Mediterranean dry in
about 1,500 years."
The Mediterranean desert, a shimmering
no-man's-land of brine lakes and playas
2,000 meters (6,500 feet) deep, existed inter
mittently for half a million years. Long,
green freshwater oases radiated from the
mouths of the rivers that feed the Mediterra
nean. Having to fall much more steeply, the
Rh6ne incised a deep canyon as far up
stream as Lyon. A still more spectacular
Nile gorge began at Aswan and cut its course
several hundred meters beneath where Cai
ro sits today.
If the desert formed in a geologic instant,
it disappeared even more quickly. About 5.5
million years ago the fossil record shows a
sudden return to marine fauna. Scientists
debate just how water broke through at
Gibraltar. Perhaps an earthquake burst the
dam. Perhaps the sea level rose enough to
send Atlantic water over the top.
"The Mediterranean had to refill in less
than a hundred years," says Bill Ryan, a ma
rine geologist on that voyage of the Chal
lenger. He believes the breakthrough was a
catastrophic cascade. "That would take the
equivalent of 170 Victoria Falls. You'd need
15 Victoria Falls just to equal the water the
sun would evaporate.
"Maybe the dam's bursting is what caused
man's ancestors to stand upright," he jokes.
"To run the hell away."
I HAVE BEEN sidetracked. I am in the
Aegean. I have taken this tiny ferryboat
from Kusadasi in Turkey to the Greek isle
of Samos. The sea is limpid, the blue sky
dazed with Aegean light, the mountains of
The Mediterranean:Sea of Man's Fate
Turkey spectacular, and my thoughts are
of Amazons.
In the age of gods an army of Amazons
made this same crossing pursued by Diony
sus, who slew them. Their bones were left to
parch on mountainous Samos.
I go into those mountains, where indeed
since antiquity many large bones have been
found. The bones intrigue me. Another
myth says they belonged to terrifying beasts
called Neades that once lived on Samos. The
horrible loud cries of the Neades, the an
cients said, could fracture the earth.
THE BONES I see at a museum in the
town of Mytilinii are not those of
Neades, but of creatures whose closest
relatives, oddly enough, were native to
China millions of years ago. Despina Platia,
the museum's self-educated curator, points
out the remnants of rhinoceroses, mast
odons, hyenas, a one-meter-tall horse, and a
Samotherium-alarge short-necked giraffe
discovered on Samos. "So many animals
were found together," says Platia, "that this
must have been a water hole."
Perhaps they died in a volcanic eruption,
a fire, or a sudden flood. More likely it was
drought that killed this strange assemblage
of creatures some seven million years ago,
according to Greek paleontologist John
Melentis.
Then, on the Aegean's other side, the
Mediterranean's rocks surprise me again. At
the University of Athens paleontologist
Constantin Doukas tells me that a similar
assortment of bones was found nearby.
Thus, the two sites were connected.
Mountainous Samos, and indeed the entire
Aegean, was once rolling, heavily wooded
terrain, says Samos expert Nikos Solounias.
How does such dry land become a sea
filled with peaked and jagged islands? The
answer that most scientists now accept is
complex, yet it may explain the shape of the
entire Mediterranean.
Think of the Aegean as a piece of western
Turkey that is slowly extending southwest
ward toward Africa. Crete is the leading
edge of this arc-shaped landmass. The Aege
an is one of the few areas where Africa and
Europe have not yet collided. Most scien
tists believe that dense oceanic crust in
front of Africa is diving beneath the lighter
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